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Weirded

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

There is a moment, in the life of every book, when it becomes suddenly, gob-smackingly real.

With Before I Wake, that moment came when I opened up that first book of Advanced Readers Copies (ARCs), and gasped, and wept, and held a lifetime's worth of hopes and dreams in my hands for the first time.  (Okay, that's perhaps a little overstated, but I think you see the point).

With The World More Full of Weeping, that moment came when I saw Erik Mohr's fantastic cover art.  It literally took my breath away, and made it real months before there were actually books.

For Bedtime Story, that moment came today.  No, I haven't seen an ARC, but the fact that I started getting emails from people who had received them brought the reality of the whole thing crushing down on me, fifteen tons of weird.

Part of the weirdness, I think, is that it's done.  DONE. DONE! A couple of years late, and after much work and angst, but DONE.  That's weird enough.

What really got me, though, I believe, was the fact that there were ARCs landing on desks before I had even seen one.  Now, I'll be getting mine in the next day or two — it takes a little longer for a package to travel from Toronto to Victoria than it does for one to travel across town — but that's not actually the weirdness.

No, the weirdness comes with the fact that, for the first time, the book is going out into the world completely outside of my control.  For the past four years, I've controlled who read it, and when. I've spoken to everyone who touched it.  I knew which pages were where at all times.  I was in control, dammit (well, as much control as one can be when one is in the throes, but that's another post for another time).

And now I'm not.  Now it has a life of its own, completely outside of my control and, to a very, very great degree, out of my awareness.  As of this morning, it's not mine anymore.

And that's a good feeling, it's just a strange one to get used to.  It's done.  It's out in the world.  And now all I can do is watch.

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Posted in Life, The new novel, Writing | No Comments »

Let the games begin

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

I find myself, I must confess, in something of a moral quandary.

And by "moral quandary", you should understand I actually mean "trying to avoid seeming a hypocrite, especially to myself".  Because I'm skirting a fine line, and I know it.

Here's the thing.  It might comes as a surprise to both of you, my faithful readers, but I am NOT a sports fan.  Not in the slightest.  I would be hard-pressed to care less about the fate of the Canucks or the Lions or the Yankees or <insert team name here>.  I just don't care.

That being said, for a long time I was an ardent Olympics fan, of both the sporting events themselves and the movement as a whole.  There was something about the once-every-four-years cycle anticipation, the stories of amateur athletes, the emotionally-affecting opening ceremonies (yes, even the lengthy inward parade of the athletes).

The bloom came off that rose a long time ago, though.  I don't know if it was the move to an every-second-year games cycle, or the granting of professional athletes the right to participate, or the seemingly sudden and at times obscene triumph of business over sport (which, now that I think about it, actually explains the first two factors), but of late, the Olympics have been… meh.  I'll still watch figure skating (shaddup), and medal round hockey, and events that I had never imagined an interest in…  I'm a sucker for those athlete profiles that most people seem to hate — what can I say, I'm a sucker for story.

And now the games are in Vancouver.

Here's the thing: I have been opposed to Vancouver hosting the Olympics since the bid-planning was announced.  Not out of some idealistic principle, but out of enlightened self-interest: you're going to spend how much of my money on this?  What if I need one of the hospital beds that has been closed?  What if someone I know needs those social programs that have been cut?  What if Xander wants to go to school, only to find that budgets have been stripped?  And hey, what if I could actually use some arts funding?

The announcement that Vancouver had won the games elicited… well, a groan, for starters.  And likely some obscenities.  Actually, strike that "likely".

And now the games are here and I'm mature enough to acknowledge a certain feeling of schaudenfraude about the balmy temperatures that are greeting the international winter sports universe (I'm not mature enough NOT to feel that schaudenfraude, but I am mature enough to admit to it.  That's something.)

So riddle me this, faithful readers: how the hell is it that I'm going to spend this weekend doing something I believe I swore I would NEVER do: hanging out in Vancouver for the Olympics?  Yup, come Saturday morning we're gonna hop the ferry, take the Canada Line in, and spend a couple of days in the belly of the beast.

You see my issue, right?  Why I might be feeling just a little hypocritical?

I've thought it through, though, and here's the thing.  Well, the list of things, actually:

1)    I lost my fight in 2003 when Vancouver won the Games.  They're going to happen whether I support them or not.

2)    Bearing the above in mind, I'm paying for them: I might as well get something out of my investment.

3)    I'm not going to any events (VanOC isn't getting one thin penny out of me), but who am I to let a perfectly good Cultural Olympiad go to waste?

4)     The Vancouver Art Gallery is free for the duration of the Games, and the world's foremost ten-year-old Leonardo da Vinci aficionado is going to go mental for that exhibit.

5)     There's something about the madness of crowds that's intoxicating — that's why it's called the madness of crowds.

6)    And hey, there's a free Wilco show Saturday night that I might partake.  Why not?  When in Rome, eat the bread, watch the circuses: you're powerless to do anything else.

So yeah, I'll be in Vancouver for (part of) the Olympics.  I'm seriously considering having a t-shirt made to read "My tax dollars at work": if nothing else, it'll save me a lot of muttering.

Posted in Life, Pop culture detritus | 3 Comments »

Live from Vancouver…

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

Much to my surprise, I had an email from the BC Achievement Foundation, asking if I minded them posting the video of Friday's speech on their website.

I know it's unlike me, and is completely at odds with my private, almost reclusive nature, but I thought, "What the heck, why not?"

So here it is.

Posted in Life, Uncategorized, Writing | 1 Comment »

The eternal circle…

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

I suppose this is the way these things SHOULD work, timing-wise.

No sooner do I see that the first installment of "Just Like the Ones He Used to Know" is up and getting hits at books.torontoist.com than I receive word from my editor at RHC that a box is headed my way by courier — the first editorial pass through the forthcoming new novel.  I should have the pages sometime today…

Story published, novel in revision, new work started… the eternal cycle. This is what my life looks like, and I couldn't be happier.

(On a side note — I've started a post with notes and thoughts and ruminations and such about the Christmas serial. I'm going to hold off on posting, though, until the whole thing is out and read, but you have that to look forward to, if you're the sort that looks forward to those things…)

Posted in Life, The new novel, Works in progress, Writing | No Comments »

An announcement…

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

As promised, some news, direct from books.torontoist.com:

The editors of Books@Torontoist are proud to announce the publication of an original story by Robert J Wiersema, bestselling author of the novel Before I Wake (now published in ten countries) and the novella The World More Full of Weeping. The story, “Just Like the Ones He Used to Know,” will be serialized on the site in eight daily posts, beginning on Thursday, December 16 and ending on Christmas Eve. The story of a man who makes a mysterious journey to his home town on a stormy Christmas Eve, “Just Like the Ones He Used to Know” revives the Victorian tradition of ringing in the holiday season with a story of the ghostly and the miraculous.

The serialized story will be accompanied by photos and original illustrations provided by Torontoist’s stable of talented artists and photographers.

Rob was kind enough to provide us with an introduction to his holiday tale. Please read on and return tomorrow for the first installment of “Just Like the Ones He Used to Know.”

At first glance, there’s something a little counter-intuitive about a Christmas ghost story. After all, isn’t the season all about births and rebirths (depending on which point on the Christian/Pagan trapeze you occupy)? Well, yes.

And yet…

There’s a long history of ghosts and Christmas. One need look no further than what is perhaps the best known Christmas tale, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which has not one but four ghosts (don’t forget poor Marley.) And on the other end of the spectrum one of the best known ghost stories – Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw – which is deliberately framed as “gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be”.

Some of my favourite examples of the form, though, come from Robertson Davies, who collected, in High Spirits, 18 years worth of the Christmas ghost stories which he had delivered at the Christmas celebrations at Massey College. His ghost stories were a little on the lighter side (though in all fairness, compared to The Turn of the Screw, practically everything is at least a little on the lighter side).

When I was asked by Torontoist to write a Christmas ghost story to be serialized in the run-up to the festive season, I took it on as a challenge. I had a limited time to write the story, which meant an even more limited time to gestate the story. I thought, for a time, that I might write something humourous. Or something Toronto-based. Then I thought I might write something personal, a bit revealing.  But then, as these things do, the story bubbled to the surface of my mind, almost fully formed, and completely different from anything I could have consciously devised. So it goes.

Although it’s a ghost story, “Just Like the Ones I Used to Know” goes back to those things which are, to me, the fundamentals of the season: warm houses, snow-storms, travel, food, and family. It’s set in the fictional B.C. town of Henderson, and it’s about coming home, and what that means.

You should definitely click over to books.torontoist.com (right now) to see this announcement in its proper setting, with an example of the art James mentions in the release.

For the record, this is the story that I was writing in the early part of this month.  I'm actually very pleased with it — it came in on-time, at-length, and it does exactly what I want it to.  Which, really, is all a writer can ask.

Speaking of asking: when James asked me to write this story, I had mixed feelings.  Traditionally, I'm not good with deadlines (which might well be the understatement of the decade), and I was decidedly overbooked.  There was a novel to finish, and reviews to catch up on, and all the ancillary stuff of work and life to contend with.  But we spent some time talking it through when I was in Toronto last month, during a boozy late afternoon at the See Hai Lounge in lovely North York, and by the end I was committed.

Thankfully, the writing came easily, and the story came out well.

Considering, though, that last November I signed on with CZP to publish The World More Full of Weeping over drinks in a Toronto bar, and now this, I'm starting to think I need to spend more time in bars when I'm in Toronto.

So, that's the news.  I hope you read the story, and enjoy it.

Posted in CZP, Life, Uncategorized, Works in progress, Writing | No Comments »

Link-apalooza

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Good morning, y'all.

If you're joining us from the Advent Books blog, drawn, no doubt, by my sly wit, my cogent commentary and my rakish good looks, well… sorry.  That was a bit of false advertising — there'll be none of that here.  This is a place for obsessive minutaie-gazing, occasional personal commentary, and a fair bit about music.  Nevertheless – welcome!  There's coffee on (because, as my agent says, "Rob, it's always the damn coffee with you!"), and a lot to explore…

And for my regular readers, all both of you: hey.  How are ya?

Had a bit of a rough morning, writing-wise.  I got the words down, but it was a bit like pulling teeth.  The nice thing I've found, though, is that when I re-read a full draft of a story or book, I can't discern between the rough writing days and the "so in the groove I don't want to stop" writing days.

I've got to get ready for work, but my computer has been running slow so I figure I should start closing some tabs.

First up, my piece at the previously mentioned Advent Books blog — a recommendation of The Absolute V for Vendetta.  And if you aren't already watching that blog, you should be — Sean and Julie are putting together a month's worth of book recommendations from folks across the spectrum of the book trade in Canada.  Bookmark it!

And secondly — much to my surprise, it was a hat-trick weekend last weekend, review-wise.  New pieces in three different papers:

My review of Amy Foster's When Autumn Leaves at the Vancouver Sun.

My review of a couple of Fables titles at the Edmonton Journal.

And my graphic novel omnibus piece at the National Post, featuring Neil Gaiman's Absolute Death, Jeff Lemire's Complete Essex County, and The Book of Genesis, Illustrated by R. Crumb.

Hmm… you know, it I didn't know better, it might look like I do nothing but read comic books all day.  I wish…

Okay, off to work.

Posted in Life, Music, Pop culture detritus, Reviewing, Site, Writing | 1 Comment »

Minutiae

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

I've been giving fairly regular updates on this — word counts and the like — on Facebook and Twitter, but I thought I should weigh in here in a bit more detail.  Well, sort of.  The details are a bit limited at this point, for a couple of reasons.

The big news is that I'm writing again — actively writing.  First draft, four a.m. writing.  It's been a while since I've done that, and I have to say, it feels good.  The muscles are loosening up, the routines are re-establishing themselves, and I'm reminded (though how could I have forgotten) just how good it feels to do this.

The occasion?  I've been commissioned to write a short story.  To write it NOW.  It will see "print" in less than two weeks, so there's not a whole lot of room for fucking around.

As for the details, and why I can't provide you with too many?

Well, the nature of the publication and the venue needs to remain vague for just a shade longer.  It's not a huge secret or anything, it's just a matter of getting the words on the page before saying too much.

Which, now that I think about it, is actually why I'm not going to be forthcoming on details about the story itself. I've mentioned my muse here before, right?  And how… possessive… she is about what she gives me?  In case I haven't, the short version is this: I get one chance to tell a story, which leaves me with a choice.  I can spend that story in passing – recounting it in a bar, or describing it, hell, even outlining it can use up the opportunity – or I can write it down.  Writing it down seems to be the better option, really.

What I CAN say is this: it's a Christmas story.  It's a Christmas ghost story, actually.  It's set in Henderson.  And it's going to be sad.  (That last one probably shouldn't come as any surprise by now, but it's tricky — to my mind, it's not sad-sad, it's bittersweet, and ultimately a happy ending.  Sort of.  But then, I feel that way about Before I Wake and The World More Full of Weeping, too, so take that with however much salt you require.)

I know – sorry about the scantness of information, but take comfort in the fact that you'll be reading the story in less than two weeks.  That's not TOO much suspense, I don't think.

In the meantime, though, the minutiae I promised.

I'm a big fan of author's notes and afterwords and things like that, bits of ephemera that give a glimpse into the writing process.  I assume I'm not the only one, so:

I'm getting up at 4 am these days.  Well, the first alarm rings at 4 — I'm generally out of bed before the third alarm at 4:25.

The story is being written in a Moleskine notebook, with a Pelikan M215 demonstrator fountain pen, tweaked with a Binder .7 italic nib, using Noodler's Black ink.

The music: so far, it seems to be a combination of Bach's Cello Suites, as performed by Yo Yo Ma, and various pieces by Estonian composer Arvo Part (including Fratres and Te Deum).  The Part seems to be working quite well — it has the perfect wintery, sad, holy tone that I'm looking for.

Okay.  Time to get ready for work.

Posted in Before I Wake, Life, Music, Uncategorized, Works in progress, World More Full of Weeping, Writing | 2 Comments »

Photographs and memories

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

I've mentioned the universe here before, right?  And how sometimes it steps in?

Picture the scene: Saturday night, after midnight, Galiano Island.  A cozy cottage, the sound of the ocean and of a nearby creek barely noticeable over the rain. Fresh from a long bath, Cori starts getting her camera ready for the next day, which includes futzing around with a recalcitrant memory card.  When it was in the camera it was reading as full, in the computer it was reading as empty, that sort of thing.

And then something happened and there they were: some 300 photos from last fall and winter.

I think we both gasped.

These were the photos that we thought had been lost through a technological failure.  Photos from last fall, from camping in the summer of 2008 (well, not me…), from the snowfall of last December.  Xander's birthday.  My birthday.  Christmas morning.  The baby beluga.  We had discovered them missing (there's an odd sentence) on Christmas day last year — we were both crushed, but… we moved on.  We thought there might be a way to get them back, but we never really pursued it, as if we were both concerned that, so long as we didn't try and fail, then there was still a possibility that they might be recovered.  So long as we didn't fuck it up, there was still a potential for those photographs, those memories, to come back.

And in that cottage on Galiano, a short walk over rocks to the shore, there they were.  As if by magic.  Photographs.  Memories.  What had been lost was found.

And as 38 slips behind me, I can't get that thought out of my mind.

Posted in Life, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Signed, sealed, delivered

Friday, November 20th, 2009

I have waited a long, LONG time to be able to use that header as a blog post.  And as of about five minutes ago, I can.  Finally.

Yes, the new novel is off my desk, delivered to Random House (well, delivered to my agent, who will midwife it to its proper home).  And I could not be happier.

It's been a long road.

The concept for the new novel (which, no, doesn't have a title yet) goes back to late 2003, a stormy midwinter night that had me thinking about fathers and sons, and the power of reading.  I had the idea in-hand and in-mind when I was wandering BookExpo in 2004, and had several long conversations about it with prospective editors.  I wrote a one-page summary of it in late June, 2004 (which resulted in a two-book offer and deal with Random House Canada), then a 25 page outline a few months later.  I settled in to write it in 2005 and… well, I wrote the opening about 38 times.  I also wrote, as a result, a half-dozen short stories and two novellas (one of which was published by CZP as, yup, The World More Full of Weeping).  I made the ever-important initial breakthrough in mid-2007 and spent a year writing, flat-out.

Yup, a year.  That's four times as long as the first draft of Before I Wake took, which is appropriate, considering that the first draft of the new untitled novel (which I'm going to refer to as "untitled" from here on out) is more than four times as long as BIW.  I worked on it at home, in New York, in Toronto, and finished the main of it somewhere in the mid-Atlantic.  The closing scenes were written after several months of intense typing (350,000 words in longhand — my illegible scrawl — takes a LONG time to type), over the Labor Day weekend last year.  

Since then, I've been revising.  That's a year of cutting.  Tweaking.  Rearranging.  The sort of work that starts with a chainsaw, and finishes with a scalpel.  A full year of revision, before my editor even had a glimpse (though, admittedly, that work wasn't quite… dedicated.  And I seem to have lost a few months this spring.)  In that time, I've adored it with the tender, heartbreaking love of a gob-smacked parent, and hated it with a white-hot fury.  There were times I savoured every word, and times I wanted to set the whole thing on fire and walk away.  All of that, by the way, is both perfectly natural and par for the course.

Crucial to that process, and key to just how good I'm feeling about it now, is Cori, Her Esteemed Editrix herself.  She knows exactly what works, and what doesn't, sees flaws before I do (and knows how to fix them) and, most crucially, knows how to ask the right questions.  It's her fault I didn't deliver the book in August as I intended to — it's to her credit that the book is SO much stronger than it would have been had I made that deadline.

Ah, deadlines.  I've actually lost track of how many I've… blown through and/or ignored.  Oh well.  It's done now.

It's done now!  What a thing to be able to say.

Even if it isn't precisely true.  There is still work to be done, and work I'm eager to get to: working with an editor, honing and polishing, is one of my favourite parts of the writing process.  It's engaging with the most focussed, most dedicated reader your work is ever likely to have, an opportunity to look at the questions that such a reader will have at the only time you can actually ADDRESS them, and their underlying issues.

So, what now?

Well, I'm going to mark the occasion by (checks watch) going to work in a few minutes.  I'm going to write a couple of overdue book reviews and catch up on some reading.  There's a commissioned short story that's been hemorrhaging red ink for a few months that desperately needs triage, and a new short story to write in the next few days, a bit of a Christmas gift to my Toronto readers.  And then there's the next novel to start.  There's a trip to Galiano for a reading this weekend, and I would imagine a boozy dinner involving a large steak and larger quantities of gin.  And a nap.  God, I'm looking forward to a nap this afternoon.

And in ten days or so, I'll have my editorial first pass.  So it goes.

Right now, though, I'm basking.  

Posted in Life, The new novel, Uncategorized, Writing | 4 Comments »

The pre-game ritual…

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

… in all its ragged glory:

smoking pic

This was Saturday afternoon, just before the event at Bakka Phoenix on Queen Street. I was too lazy to cross the street for the sacramental Red Bull, but that's probably all right: as it is, I went substantially longer than either Dave Nickle or Claude Lalumiere (hey, tell me I've got 20 minutes, I'm going to use twenty minutes!).

Thanks to everyone who came out — it was a packed house.

And if you weren't in Toronto, there's always Galiano — this Sunday at 3 pm, I'll be reading and signing at Galiano Island Books.  So if you see a guy who looks like the above loitering in the shadows near the store at 2:55 pm, don't call the police — I'm supposed to be there.

Posted in Book tour, CZP, Life, World More Full of Weeping, novella to be named later | 1 Comment »

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